Monday, 26 December 2016

Creating E-Content Faster With Rapid E-Learning Development

Training and Learning is a continuous process in the corporate environment, considering the immense pressure to be at par with the latest developments across all industries. Most companies have adopted various developing tools for creating online learning courses. But, we have an excellent tool for creating e-courses that most of us are comfortable with, and can utilize for effective content creation – PowerPoint. PowerPoint is often utilized to create presentations with common elements, such as bullet points and stock graphics, yet it is much more helpful.

Subject Matter Experts, or SMEs, can themselves create e-courses, cutting the development time by considerable measures. In addition to converting the entire content with ease, rapid authoring tools also help build interactivity into courses. Attractive graphics, audio, and video can be added to the course to make it multimedia rich and hence, more impactful. And all this at a fraction of time, compared to traditional e-learning development cycle.

While creating online learning courses, do not focus on sharing information alone, instead focus on offering opportunities for exploration. Include stories, anecdotes and word problems instead of the text approach to allow employees to make decisions about their learning, such as what they will explore next.

Images and graphics can easily be added to Powerpoint and it is often a temptation to just take what is available. But it is a good idea to think beyond just ClipArt and incorporate image grabs that make more sense to the learners, even simple animations can increase the content appeal by large proportions.

External Links are a useful resource within a learning course and can provide a sense of exploration for the learners. Many people are unaware about this feature of PowerPoint, but it can function like a webpage and can provide links to the external resources. Developers can utilize this feature to create an environment for learning, offering both external resources and internally linking them. By providing links to other pages, you can also include links which allow them to read and download resources for further study or to refresh, whenever they feel the need.

Instead of linear navigation, include choices that offer user control when the learners engage with the learning content. This provides the feeling of self-led learning and many adult learners prefer it over the strictly structured learning. For many learners, it may also suit their learning styles better when they have a free access to the material and can refer to certain sections as per need. After a few main slides, the learner can be allowed to choose where to go next and then go back to the main page.

Most e-learning developers are pressed for time and PowerPoint provides a host of interesting options that can be utilized to create effective eLearning courses.